Are you sure you got that right?

@Steven Jones

Uh, help me here. Got to disagree, because that's not what happens with random writes. The *best* access patterns are those with lots of small, random updates, because the system turns those into sequential writes in new space; ONTAP doesn't overwrite blocks.

And for fragmnatation (which any fule no happens on any highly utilised system) there's reallocation; a background, user-schedulable process that "defrags". I'd like to see your proposal for avoiding fragmentation. You could make a fortune...

I *know* this is wrong

<quote>

The company's marketing VP, Larry Cormier, ... contrasts NetApp and LeftHand cloning approaches: "NetApp's FlexClone is file-based. Ours is block-based. The (VDI) data looks more like a database than a file."

</quote>

I beg to differ. NetApp's deduplication is block based, not file based. FlexClone is a block based zero capacity technology. It doesn't deduplicate data because it doesn't duplicate it in the first place.